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INTRODUCTION
County Trends in Maternal and Child Health is intended to serve as a basic
reference source that provides detailed information for the state as a whole,
each of the Arkansas Department of Health Management Areas, and each county
in the state. This report was developed in order to meet the information needs
of public health officials, program managers, administrators, policy makers,
and other interested persons throughout the state of Arkansas.
In this edition of County Trends in Maternal and Child Health the primary focus
is on natality, maternal and child health, and related issues for the period of
1994 through 1998. This subject was chosen for two reasons. First, many public
health programs are primarily concerned with the problems of natality and
maternal and child health. Second, several years of data are readily available
at this time.
Thirteen major indicators relating to issues of fertility, natality, and
maternal and child health have been included in this report. They are:
(1) general fertility,
(2) teenage (ages 15-19) fertility,
(3) births to unmarried women,
(4) births to unmarried teens,
(5) less than 12 years education,
(6) low birthweight births,
(7) no first trimester care,
(8) infant mortality,
(9) neonatal mortality,
(10) postneonatal mortality,
(11) fetal deaths,
(12) perinatal mortality, and
(13) induced abortions.
In addition, population data are provided on the number of women ages 15 through
44 and ages 15 through 19. All of the data in this report is based on county of
residence, not county of occurrence.
There are two sections to the report. "Summaries", the first section, consists
of two pages for each of the 13 maternal and child health indicators. The first
page gives a non-technical definition of each indicator, and an example showing
how each of the indicators is calculated. All references to Arkansas statistics
can be found in other Center for Health Statistics publications. United States
statistics are found in publications produced by the National Center for Health
Statistics.
The second page shows a map of the distribution of each measure by county. To
assist the reader in the interpretation of the data, a brief narrative discusses
the map. The maps have three shadings. The heavily-shaded counties are more
than one standard deviation above the state average. Counties with medium
shading are within (+/-) one standard deviation of the state average. Counties
with no shading are more than one standard deviation below the state average.
The tables section of the report consists of 86 tables: one table for the state
as a whole, one for each of the ten ADH Management Areas, and one for each of
the 75 counties. The format is identical for each.
Each table shows data for each of the 13 indicators in the years 1994 through
1998. Three additional columns show five-year average rates for the total
population, Whites and Blacks. Other nonwhites are not listed separately due
to small numbers.
For each of the indicators, three separate pieces of information are presented:
the frequency; the rate, ratio, or percent; and the rank.
First, the frequency reported is the actual count of the live births, infant
deaths, neonatal deaths, postneonatal deaths, fetal deaths, perinatal deaths, or
induced abortions occurring to the residents in the state, ADH Management Area,
or county.
Second, a rate, ratio, or percent is calculated and presented in order to
compensate for differences in population size. This allows the reader to
compare different counties, areas, and states to one another, or to the nation.
Similarly, the same geographic area can be compared across different years to
identify trends over time. The rate is not computed when the denominator is
less than twenty. This is represented by a dash, "-".
The final statistic ranks each ADH Management Area on a scale of 1 to 10 and
each county 1 to 75. "One" indicates the highest rate. In the event of a tie,
the largest of the corresponding ranks are used. Because there may be little or
no Black population in some counties, ranks for the "White" and "Black" columns
were not done.
Two statistical tests are computed for each statistic. The first, designated
with a "*", indicates that there is a statistically significant (p<=.05)
difference between the rates in this area and the remainder of the state. The
second test, designated with a "+", indicates that there is a statistically
significant difference between the rates in this year and the previous year.
WARNING TO THE READER
The data in this report are collected by the Division of Vital Records and the
Center for Health Statistics. The reader should be aware that certain vital
events may have been inaccurately reported, miscoded, or not reported at all.
Because of ongoing updates and additions to the data files, as well as
improvements in data collection and processing techniques, the numbers in
this report are not necessarily identical to data from earlier reports.
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